If you have been following the news lately, you must have seen that layoffs are happening all over the world. These layoffs are related to the economy and they have mostly happened in the tech industry as far as mass ones are concerned. While Amazon did announce their first round of layoffs, we already knew that they overhired during the pandemic and that is the reason why they need to downsize now. But Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has just announced a second round of layoffs at the company which brings the total number of job cuts to 27,000. This is after 9000 new job cuts were announced.
This time around, Amazon CEO is cutting jobs in an area which he turned into a profitable one which is the Cloud Computing business known as Amazon Web Services. Andy says that he is forced to cut jobs due to an “uncertain economy” and also informs that the growth of his company is cooling down. However, it is worth noting that Amazon has seen a meteoric rise in growth over the last few years despite the pandemic. In fact, the pandemic has helped Amazon grow even more during that period.
Andy Jassy’s note to the employees read, due to the “uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,”. Amazon’s cloud business is still growing but not at a rate that they saw few years back during the pandemic as cloud services were being used massively.
Amazon’s CFO, during their earnings call, said “Starting back in the middle of the third quarter of 2022, we saw our year-over-year growth rates slow as enterprises of all sizes evaluated ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to the tough macroeconomic conditions,”
The reason why these layoffs were announced in two different rounds, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explains, is “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
